


regardless of ideology

by sequestering



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Angst with a Happy Ending, Historical Inaccuracy, Hockey Through the Ages, Immortality, M/M, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:27:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27183124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sequestering/pseuds/sequestering
Summary: Sid has lived over a hundred long years.Those brief months spent squaring off across an icy lake with a Soviet soldier were among the best of them all.(Sid and Geno meet again and again, until they make it stick.)
Relationships: Sidney Crosby/Evgeni Malkin
Comments: 38
Kudos: 178
Collections: Sid/Geno Spooky Fest 2020





	regardless of ideology

**Author's Note:**

  * For [goodnightpuckbunny](https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodnightpuckbunny/gifts).



> Goodnightpuckbunny - pining immortal hockey players through history. Not gonna lie, it kind of kicked my ass, but I couldn't resist your prompt. I hope you enjoy.
> 
> A huge thanks to the ever wonderful [romanticdrift](https://romanticdrift.tumblr.com/) for gently forcing this into coherency at record speed.
> 
> CW: Some derogatory terms for Russians; one use of misogynistic language; references to war and non-graphic references to war death; so much historical inaccuracy.
> 
> EDIT: Date updated to reflect author reveal.

1938

Sid is told that it was a good death.

Taylor had been warm and comfortable, her frail body wrapped in mountains of blankets, a cup of tea at her side, and her beloved dog curled at her feet. Her daughter had found her only a few minutes later, the tea still steaming gently.

“It was so fast,” Olivia promises, wiping at red-rimmed eyes. “No tonics or physicians; just between one breath and the next.”

Sid swallows thickly. “There wasn’t— she wasn’t distressed?”

Olivia shakes her head. “No, no. It was very peaceful,” she says, more tears spilling down her cheeks. “I think she knew”— she chokes back a sob —”I think she knew it was time to go.” 

  
  
  
  


The funeral is a brief affair.

For all that the family does their best, there is little enough to go around these days. Even the Maritimes, shielded as they are by the ocean, have by now been reached by the shadow of the depression that’s swallowed up the mainland. Sid doesn’t think Taylor would have minded the paucity of food.

He watches as her children give their speeches with wobbling voices and watery eyes, as a grandchild reads out a poem, as the coffin is lowered slowly into the freshly cut grave.

There’s an empty, nauseous feeling in his stomach.

He had known this was coming, that Taylor was older now than their parents had ever been, that her quick mind had slowed and lost the thread of conversations, that she was tired. He’d prepared himself for the agony of loss, for the constant ache that had followed the death of his parents. He hadn’t realised it would be like this: mindless and empty and so much worse. It is one thing to bury a mother and father, it is another entirely to bury a baby sister.

Their grave-stones are stood together, the roughly hewn stones leaning towards one another in the uneven ground. Troy, Trina, Taylor.

He stays long after the rest of the guests have left, until the sky above him is darkening, shadows growing and lengthening around him, until it’s only he and Olivia stood in the small cemetery.

Olivia takes his hand, looking for an instant so like Taylor that his chest throbs with it. “Don’t be a stranger, Sidney,” she says quietly.

It is kind of her. Taylor’s children are always kind, but kindness only goes so far. They’ve never quite known what to do with their strange unaging uncle. They don’t know him, not really; Sid’s itinerant lifestyle made that impossible. And interaction is difficult, uncomfortable, with a man who grew up alongside their mother, who is now half their age.

He squeezes Olivia’s hand, but he doesn’t respond. He doesn’t want to lie to her.

  
  
  
  


Sid is tired of drifting without purpose or structure, of a life spent avoiding notice or attention. He is tired of Nova Scotia, of the ghosts that lurk across the landscape, Taylor’s laughter in the calls of the gulls, his mother’s perfume in the spring flowers, his father’s voice in the shouts of fishermen.

There is a poster on the wall of the post office, a call for volunteers. It’s a cause. It’s a whole new world across the ocean. It's an escape.

At this point, Sid will take anything.

  
  
  
  


1945

Meeting the Soviets is anticlimactic. 

The brass have been beating their gums about it for weeks: the strategic significance of this moment when the Krauts are well and truly beaten, the corpse of their country torn in two.

"This'll be front page in Toronto, boys," Major Forsythe tells them, grin creasing the dirt caked into his face. "Washington and London, too, I'd expect. That’d be something to write home about, eh?"

He gets a smattering of tired nods, a few murmurs of agreement.

Most of the men haven't written home in weeks. This far north, gloves only come off to eat, sometimes not even then. Holding a pen is near impossible; even the most dedicated of lovelorn writers had found their words frozen when November's biting winds began to whip through the camp.

Or so Sid has gathered from his company's complaints. The cold doesn't much bother him.

In the end, the the Red Army isn't much to write about anyway.

They're ordered into their finest greens. Boots are polished with oil grease, and rips and stains mended or covered as best they can. They watch and do their best to appear imposing as the Soviets troop into view.

Any dull curiosity Sid might have had about the Soviets melts away when they step over the hastily-erected barricades. These aren't the bear-like giants from the radio reports, twice as tall and three times more savage than a normal man. If not for their uniforms, they'd be indistinguishable from the North Americans; a group of too-thin, too-tired looking men, bundled into layers of thick coats.

The Canadian troops stand around shivering for another half hour, the captains engaging in thinly-veiled posturing as the photographer fumbles his equipment around with cold-clumsy fingers. Then it's a few awkwardly posed handshakes before they're released back to the barracks.

"Fucking Ruskies," grumbles Amos, rubbing his hands together and blowing on them vigorously. 

"Pack of vultures" agrees another of the infantrymen, voice thick through a heavily knotted scrim. "We finally put the boot to Fritz, and they swoop in to pick up the credit."

Sid nods along, lets the easy conversation wash over him as the night draws in. He doesn't have much to add, hasn't for years.

They're expected to spend a month in Pardubice, just off the Elbe and camped a few miles from the Soviets. There's reconstruction work to be done, heavy back-breaking work that's hard enough without the constant threat of local retaliation. They're told to make nice, give out chocolate to kids, help with private repairs where they can spare the manpower, take only what they need, nothing more.

Later, the generals will say that's what they did. Maybe it even is. Sid doesn't ask, tries not to know. If he hears things, catches fragments of sentences and laughter, well, maybe he misunderstood.

Mostly Sid keeps to himself.

That's not unusual. There's a few guys who don't talk at all anymore, even more who'll talk but don't say anything that makes sense, just long rambling sentences that start and end in thousand mile stares. So long as Sid's pulling his weight, isn't spending his nights jibbering into a cup or picking fights with the wind, then he's doing better than some, then no one much cares if he spends his evenings sat too close to the fire, staring into the embers.

He does pull his weight, working hard, taking the shifts no one else wants. He volunteers for the out-of-town duties, the ones that take him into the huge, ancient forests that loom over the Elbe. The forest floor is strewn with mines, barbed wire, and discarded metal gubbins. It's as much a witness to this war as he is, but when he looks up, through the dizzyingly tall firs and their sweeping branches, catching glimpses of a clouded grey sky, he can almost forget that. The locals must have looked up at the same sky through the same trees for hundreds of years, long before the barbed wire.

It's on one of those patrols that he finds the lake.

It isn't large, or maybe it would be if it weren't broken up by trees, reeds and other forest debris. The surface is patchy, littered with pine needles and vegetation, the ice a murky blue-grey. It's nothing like the miles of pure white snow that Sid used to skate across as a child, but it smells the same.

It's a reminder of long evenings of aching smiles, of the rawhide leather they used to strap blades to their feet, of the woodsmoke that had filled their little coastal home.

Sid borrows the map from Ketterley, traces the day's route. They're not more than two miles from the town, without the ammunition, the haversack, and his Enfield, it'd be forty minutes at a brisk walk.

The decision is made long before he admits it to himself. Early that evening, after mess when the camp is settling into its night time rhythm, Sid gets himself dressed for patrol then walks quietly past the gambling night guards, letting their raucous laughter melt into echoes until he's alone in the forest, the only sounds the muffled thump of his heavy boots on the frozen earth.

It's a dark walk, the light of his torch a flickering pinprick in the thick winter night. The shadows of the trees dance and jump around him, growing and shrinking with the movements of his hand.

The lake is exactly as he remembers it, an icy patchwork of shadows and forest debris. Sid spends longer than he should staring at it, watching the pale moonlight cast strange shapes over the surface. He could stand there forever if he wanted. Still and silent as the forest around him. Sometimes he wonders why he hasn't already.

It won't be today, though. Not with the moonlit gleam of the ice calling quietly to him. He takes off his gloves to buckle on his makeshift skate blades, and he feels uncomfortably naked. It's been months since he allowed himself to drop the facade, to let the freezing air whip harmlessly over cold skin. Uncomfortable but freeing.

His first steps on ice are wobbly, adjusting to the wonky chassis, to the bumpy surface, to the smooth push of the movement. That doesn't last long. Muscle memory, forged over decades, decades ago, stops him falling, gets him gliding, turning, spinning. He switches to backwards, the movement more instinct than anything else, and he can feel his lips turning into a smile.

The achingly bright white of Canadian winters, the clear skies and snow-laden rivers may as well be a different world to a small darkened forest pond in Germany. But it's the same feeling, the same burning thighs and cold air rushing past his ears. If he closes his eyes, he can almost hear Taylor laughing.

Sid skates until the weak morning sun begins to flicker through the trees. Then it's a hurried trek back to camp, making it late enough to get a few bleary-eyed looks, but not enough to warrant any real curiosity. Sid barely even notices; the day trickles by the same way as the day before, and he's miles away, hearing only the clean cut of metal on ice.

  
Sid's never slept. Rather, he can't remember ever sleeping. He must have done so once, before, but those memories are blurred and bleeding at the edges, softened by the passing of decades.

Now he just lies still and tries not to think. That's been easier than ever these last mud-spattered years, any excuse to go somewhere else, to float away from the rattle of gunfire and the thunder of artillery fire. It's pleasant, but it's not necessary.

If he heads out three nights running, spends long hours skating until his legs shake and even his breathless lungs are aching, it won't show on his face or in sleep-bungled work. His bunkmates don't comment on his absences. It's been long enough since they've been posted anywhere near a town. They make their assumptions, and he doesn't correct them.

It's the closest Sid's felt to alive for years.

Maybe that's why, when he sees the man in Soviet colours, he doesn't turn back to camp.

It's a jolt, a nasty one, the reminder that this lonely lake in the middle of nowhere is no more his than anything in this land. Now that Sid thinks about it, it's closer to the Soviet barracks than it is to the Allied barracks. He's probably lucky to have escaped this long without notice.

The man is tall, really tall, is Sid's first thought. But lanky with youth, and worn thin. Maybe it's by the cold, maybe by hunger, maybe just by constant exhaustion, the way it's worn away so many of them. He also skates like a dream, fluid and powerful, all loping strides that eat up the ice in seconds.

If the Soviet notices when Sid sits down on the lakeside to buckle on his blades, he doesn't react. He doesn't react when Sid glides into the centre of the ice either, just begins making circles around the edges of the lake, staying carefully out of Sid's way.

The silence that settles between them is stiff, uncomfortable. They skate around each other for a few hours before the Russian turns back towards the shore. Sid watches him out of the corner of his eye, as he folds his long legs up to remove his skates, pulls on his greatcoat, and walks into shadows of the forest. 

He's back the next night, and the next night too. Sid wonders vaguely how he manages it, balancing spending half the night skating with completing whatever duties he has back at his camp. But who knows how the Red Army runs its affairs. Perhaps he takes odd shifts, or perhaps the famously bottomless reservoir of Russian bodies allows for late nights spent on one's own business. Certainly, for all that this soldier often looks lean and empty, he is never tired.

In any case, the situation is not so bad. There are certain things you learn about a person, spending hours together, even without speaking, and Sid likes what he learns about the Russian.

If the soldier falls, he doesn't swear or posture the way Sid's known so many men do; instead he laughs, infectious and too loud in the quiet forest. He doesn't much smile, but there's a light in his eyes, the genuine happiness of someone doing something they love for no reason other than that they love it. As bizarre the situation may be, to have some companionship is even sort of comforting.

  
They can't talk. The Soviet doesn't seem to have any English, and Sid certainly doesn't speak a word of Russian. Their only communication is more basic: a nod hello, a nod goodbye."

They exchange names on their fourth meeting. The Soviet has begun the laborious process of unbuckling the skate blades from his boots when Sidney skates past and gives him their habitual farewell nod. Only their eyes meet, and suddenly it feels wrong to have no name for this man.

"Sidney," he says.

The Soviet looks up startled, hangdog eyes wide.

"Sidney," Sid repeats, pointing to himself.

There are a few moments of quiet before the Soviet's eyes clear. "Sidney," he says, shaping the vowels carefully. Then, "Evgeni Vladimirovich."

"Vladimirovich," Sid tries, far less elegantly than the solider managed 'Sidney'.

Vladimirovich shakes his head, not laughing, but with a glint in his eye that says he'd like to. He says a few words in Russian, then, gesticulating again, "Malkin."

"Malkin," Sid says, relieved when it comes out less garbled. He hopes that's still the soldier's name, not an unflattering curse word. Malkin seems happier with that pronunciation and smiles, waving a hand in goodbye.

Names morph into more. Sharing such a small patch of ice, it would be hard not to.

When one of them trips on a protruding root or takes a tumble over a slippery patch of ice, there are looks that turn from sympathetic to gently mocking. They have overly competitive races around the edge of the lake, and follow them up with garbled arguments about short-cuts and how much contact is too much contact. They kick about pieces of wood or small stones, showing off light feet and sharp edges.

There's the skating, too. The more Sid watches his new friend, the more he realises he's better than anyone Sid's ever seen. Malkin skates like he's dancing, cutting and weaving, leaving intricate patterns across the ice. Sid watches him intently, learns constantly.

It's not exactly a language, but they get by. Maybe better than get by.

Sid leaves every morning lighter than he's been in years, decades. It's hours every day that are free from barbed wire and barbed words, hours of thinking only of his body, of his skates as they cut smoothly across the ice, of Malkin.

They've been skating together for nearly a week when Malkin greets him by throwing something at his feet. It lands in the brackish snow with a jangle of metal and leather.

Sid picks it up with careful fingers, straightening out the buckles. They're skate blades, Soviet-make, the same as what's strapped to Malkin's boots. "These— for me?" he stutters, looking up at him.

Malkin shrugs expansive and non-committal, and Sid wants to say a hundred different things, wants to thank him, wants to ask why. In the end, he settles on a simple, serious, "Thank you," hoping his tone gets across his meaning. "Really, thank you."

It seems to do the trick. Malkin grins. and says something in his own language. Sid smiles back, wide and helpless, and there's something light and fizzy bubbling in his chest. He fumbles for the blades, tries to bite back the smile as he tethers them on, fingers clumsy with what he hopes Malkin will assume is the cold.

Malkin has begun making lazy loops around the lake, clearly not interested in watching Sid struggle with the unfamiliar straps. They're bent and battered, probably spent the war stowed haphazardly in the back of a pack, but they're far superior to the filed down scrap metal Sid has been making do with.

He takes to the ice slowly, doesn't want to fall on his face in front of a skate of Malkin's caliber, but warms up quickly. There's a small knot of wood lying on the surface that Sid moves between his skates, then kicks over to the Russian. Malkin looks amused, nudges it with a toe, then takes off with it towards the other side of the lake. Sid shouts indignantly and races after him.

They play a game that's not unlike football, but with more roughhousing. More cheating too actually; Sid's pretty sure that Malkin wrapping him in a bear hug while he tries to steal their makeshift ball isn't strictly with the rules.

Sid gets two weeks, two glorious weeks of ridiculous games, overly-competitive shoving matches, and his new friend's brilliant smile.

Then it ends as suddenly as it began.

Sid arrives at the lake to find it deserted. Malkin's missed nights before; Sid supposes he must sleep sometimes so he doesn't worry until Malkin misses the next day too.

The ice still has its magic, but it's diminished. Now that Sid knows how wonderful it is to race, to challenge, to learn, going back feels somehow hollow. He skates anyway, lets the world recede into the mingled smell of ice and pine needles. There's peace, but there's no laughter.

As the sun rises, he unbuckles his skates, tucks the equipment carefully into his bag, and tells himself that three weeks isn't enough to know someone, certainly isn't enough to miss them with a gnawing ache.

Some careful questioning around camp reveals that the Soviets moved out on the first day of Malkin's absence.

"Ran home and left this fubar to us," spits Bradford as they're cleaning their rifles at a rest point.

Sid hums an agreement and tries not to feel bereft. He wonders why Malkin hadn't said anything; probably he couldn't, didn't know how to get the meaning across in a language made of metal on ice; probably he would have said something if he could. Sid tells himself all this, but it doesn't much help the hurt.

Malkin had seemed dreamlike, emerging only in the evenings, then slipping away before the light of dawn. Now it just feels anticlimactic. That a man can appear and disappear in his life so suddenly.

Sid hopes he's alright, wherever he is.

His regiment’s return to Canada is slow. Europe may be defeated, but the war rages on. Any ships that can be spared from the Pacific for transportation are slow, lumbering.

The men fill their days with dreams of homecoming, girlfriends who have waited years, wives who never stopped writing, kids whose crude scribbled drawings have turned into wobbly lettering. Sid's no different. His dreams are filled with home, with the stink of fish markets, with the wide rocky coasts, with the roiling grey sea that's not the same anywhere else on the planet.

He steps stiff-legged out into the chaos of the Halifax station, and there’s a tugging in his bones that stills. Perhaps that's how everyone feels about their place of birth, that sense of belonging, of being as much a part of the place as the hills and cliffs. Perhaps everyone breathes the air and feels stronger, alive, like there's breath in his lungs and heat in his blood.

His eyes prickle. It's not tears - he doesn't cry, can't cry; it's more like relief. Cole Harbour is full of ghosts, of a family he can’t return to, will never see again, but it’s more home than anywhere else on earth. He missed it.

  
  


Ten years. That's how long Sid gives himself in Cole Harbour.

He rents a small room in one of the little boarding houses that's sprung up on the outskirts of the town.

"You haven't got family 'round here have you, dear?" asks the kindly landlady, peering at him closely as she takes his money. "You got a mighty familiar look about you."

She introduced herself as Edith, but Sid remembers when she went by Edie, small enough that he could lift her up and spin her giggling around in the air.

"No, ma'am," he says politely. "Only family I got's out west."

She peers a few seconds more then shakes her head and tuts deprecatingly. "You'll have to forgive me," she laughs. "These old eyes have seen a fair few faces passing through."

"It happens a lot," Sid says, taking the key she slides across the desk. "Just got one of those faces."

He goes back to fishing. There's always room in the town for a skilled lobster catcher, and the pay is decent. It reminds him of his father, of long days spent together on the sea, of careful hands on knots and traps. There are differences these days that come creeping in over the years: nylon trap heads that mean no more constant battles to keep cotton twines from rotting; stiff polypropylene rope used in place of the Manila his mother used to weave; small-boat operations replaced inexorably by the commercial fishers.

Other things never change. The crags and cliffs of the coastline, the flashing of the lighthouse, the familiar cacophony of boat horns and hungry gulls and noisy sailors butting heads.

It's a good decade. After a few years, the rough cuts and abrasions of a fisherman's hands overwrite the scars of the gun callouses. He ingratiates himself with the town, establishes a regular spot in the local pub, a reputation for few words and loud laughter.

Ten years isn’t long enough. It never is.

  
  
  
  


1958

When the ten years ticks down, when his time is up, he traces a path around Nova Scotia, across the bay down to Halifax, following the winding sea road down to Lockeport then Yarmouth. Back when he'd been small, when his parents had followed the same road with all their worldly possessions strapped to a wagon, the family had barely needed to put two hundred miles between themselves and their last home before dad would turn around with a broad smile and say, "That should do it, eh?"

These days a man can travel a hundred miles in a few hours. The swathes of Nova Scotia that used to seem so vast are crosshatched with roads and trains and bus routes. It seems so much smaller now.

Sid heads west to Vancouver. The city is like nothing he's ever seen before, millions and millions of people living in each other's space, building their lives around each other's habits, and never knowing their neighbour's name. It's loud, and it's lonely, and it never stops moving.

Nine years there, then back east to Trois-Rivières. It's smaller, more like home. He learns French there, learns how to drive, learns how to kiss in the back of a beer parlour with a man who laughs at his wide eyes.

That bit’s not like home at all, not like anything Sid knows: places where it’s expected that men are like him. He goes in shaking, shoulders tensed and braced for sirens and flashing lights, he comes out dizzy, drunk less on the booze than the freedom.

The man asks him to stay. Sid doesn’t, can’t risk his head or his heart like that, but it’s nice to be asked, to be wanted somewhere.

  
  


Sid thinks about the Soviet soldier more than he should.

He must be married by now. Probably a few kids. Maybe even grandchildren.

Sid wonders what he looks like, if he ever aged into his gangly limbs, if the lines of his face sharpened into something classically handsome. He’ll have grey hairs by now, probably deep smiles lines carved into his face, skin that’s beginning to sag with age and memory. Still handsome, though, Sid’s sure of that.

He wonders if Malkin ever thinks about the Canadian he met all those years ago on a shabby ice rink in north Germany.

Probably not.

  
  
  


1970

Joining the Canadiens is an accident.

Sid's been in Montreal for six months when the Voyageurs host their annual open tryouts. Even six months in, he knows the Voyageurs. Of course, he knows the Voyageurs. They're hard to miss, swaggering about after their training sessions, eating into the time set aside for amateur games: a team of men who almost made the NHL, and will never let themselves forget it.

The tryouts are a joke, an excuse to humiliate the locals. That's all. So when Sid gets offered an invite by a teammate he should say no.

"You're not scared are you, Sid?" laughs Rob in the locker room, raising his voice enough to attract more gleeful mockery. "Not scared of the big bad Voyageurs?"

Sid grins back at him. "Anyone who says he's not scared of Anderson is a liar," he says laughing.

Rob poses dramatically and flexes his biceps. "Not me," he says to appreciative whoops. "These babies aren't scared of nothing."

In the end he accompanies Rob to the tryouts. Part of it's curiosity. Part of it's pride. Most of it's about the competition. Sid's never had the chance to compete seriously; junior leagues had been pretty thin on the ground in the rural Nova Scotia of his childhood, and his parents had never thought the risk worth it.

There had been a lot that wasn't worth the risk.

One open tryout, though. After so many years of being so careful.

  
  


Sid wipes the floor with the Voyageurs.

They're good, more trained, with better stick-handling and the kind of strength that speaks to a life spent honing bodies into sporting weapons.

But the difference between good and great players will always be in the practice, the dedication. And he’s been practicing for longer than any of his opponents have been alive, before any of their parents were born. Sid's skating is the kind that comes from decade on decade of muscle-memory, from the fearlessness of someone who can't be hurt, from the stamina of someone without breath to lose.

Maybe it’s unfair. Mostly, Sid feels that nothing about his life is fair, that if he’s found an upside to immortality then he’s paid for it dearly.

  
  
  
  


The coach pulls him aside at the end of the tryouts. "Where'd you play junior?" he asks, eyes greedy, thick fingers digging painfully into Sid's shoulder.

Sid shrugs him off. "I didn't," he says, coldly polite.

"Bullshit," the man says, smile aggressively jocular. "Fine player like yourself. You'd have been snapped up."

"I'm from Nunavat," Sid lies. "Not so easy to find a league up there."

There's no arguing with that. In any case, Sid gives them plenty more to talk about. Like a franchise record hundred-point rookie season in the AHL. Like an offer to sign with the Canadiens.

He should stop. He knows he should stop. He should have stopped months ago when he first started attracting banners emblazoned with his name, weeks ago when the scouts started circling. It would be so easy to put an end to it all. A few games of losing foot-races, wild passes, missed shots; he'd be just another AHLer who never made the show.

But he gets on the ice, and he can't. The world falls away; no long empty future, no aching chill in his chest, no fear of discovery. Just him, the puck and his teammates. It's fast and challenging and bruising and entirely all-consuming. Sid wants that forever.

He says yes to the Canadiens.

Sid has lived over a hundred long years. Some he'll look back on fondly for as long as he lives; long summer days with his parents and Taylor, where the days ran together in a blur of love and laughter; evenings spent around a bar in Cole Harbour, surrounded by warm voices and the gentle swell of the sea; those brief months spent squaring off across a rink with a Soviet soldier.

His first year with the Canadiens is another of them.

It's non-stop. His body's always aching: bruised knuckles, cracked ribs, burning thighs. He's always moving: out with the team, jetting across America, racing up the ice with the cold air whipping through his hair.

He tells himself he’ll stop after the first Stanley Cup, then after the second, then after the third. They don’t slow down, can’t seem to stop winning, and the euphoria is addictive.

"They say you're the closest thing the NHL has to a Cinderella story," a reporter tells Sid after a three-point game. "What do you think of that, eh?"

Sid just laughs carefree and maybe the slightest bit manic because they don't know the half of it.

He attends every team physical with his heart in his throat; every fight comes with the risk of someone noticing that he regrows teeth in days; every injury is an exercise in pay-acting, in frantically skimming through medical texts to see how a torn muscle is supposed to heal.

Because he's skating on thin ice, because his life is a patchwork held together by lies and luck. He's thrown his chips now, and they'll land where they may.

  
  
  
  


1974

He’s selected for the IIHF World Championships. It’s almost absurd that he’s been in the league five years, and only now seen the Canadiens booted out of the playoffs early enough to compete internationally.

They’re a good team as well, packed as they are with Canadiens players unused to the early season end. It gives the North American media more of a reason to show interest in the tournament, now there’s a team with hopes to challenge the unprecedented levels of Soviet dominance. It makes the Canada vs Russia game at the end of their group stages matter in a way that games rarely do outside of the playoffs.

A minute into Sid’s first shift, he glances up, meets Kasterov's eyes, and immediately catches an edge. He's slightly older, grown into his gangly frame, but it's the same hangdog eyes, the same focused scowl, the same domineering ferocity.

Sid tumbles over his feet and slams hard into the boards. The air punches hard out of his lungs, leaving him gasping, choking on nothing. It's too much; the screaming of his ribs, the roar of the crowd through the rink, those familiar eyes staring back at him. Muscle memory takes over, has him stumbling mindlessly back to his feet, ignoring the jeers of the crowd to take off after the puck.

His head feels thick, thoughts slow and clumsy, like skating over slush. He meets Kasterov's eyes again, and they're shocked wide, holding his gaze for a moment too long. Kasterov recognises him. 

Malkin recognises him.

The end of his shift is a desperate relief. He stumbles through the gate, banging his hip hard on the catch and narrowly avoiding another fall.

"The fuck's going on out there, Forbes?" shouts their coach, leaning in too close. "You're a fucking embarrassment." The words sound tinny in Sid’s ears, slow and echoing across the space between them.

He mumbles something in response. An excuse or an apology, he doesn't know. Coach yells some more, spittle and curses flying freely from his lips. 

The rest of the game is a blur. Sid's head is a hurricane, blown and battered by a storm of thoughts; his passes don't connect, his shots go wide; there's sweat pouring down the inside of his pads, but the puck's always just out of reach.

That's Malkin watching him from the Russian benches; that's Malkin blowing through their defence, a force of nature; that's Malkin he's shoulder-to-shoulder with, the weight of his body impossible heavy against Sid's side, leaving Sid's skin tingling long after he's returned to the benches.

  
  
  


Intellectually, he's always thought he couldn't be the only one.

There are billions of people in the world; billions more who once were. Surely, there are others like him, leading their silent lives, living between the cracks.

He'd long given up finding any of them. The numbers, the chances were beyond what he could imagine; a needle in a haystack the size of Nova Scotia, a single fish in the vast swathes of the ocean. Even if they did meet, if by some miracle their paths were to cross, how were they to know it.

But Malkin is there, sitting barely fifty metres away, staring back at him across the rink. Sid can't look at him, can't look away, can't breathe.

  
  
  
  
  


Canada loses. Sid barely notices.

That evening, he escaped his teammates' attempts to drown their sorrows with Swedish ale and haunts the halls of their hotel.

He charms the receptionist into giving up the floor the Russians have booked out.

"Oh, but I would stay away from there," she says, dropping her voice to a whisper. "Ida delivered their linens this morning, and it's crawling with KGB agents. The KGB! Can you believe it?"

"They're there all the time?" Sid asks.

"Twenty-four seven. We told them that the hotel supplies security, but they wouldn't hear of it," she says conspiratorially. "We all think they're smuggling vital documents across the border, like in a spy flick." She winks broadly.

It shouldn't be a surprise. They all know what the USSR's like; they've all seen the bulky men in loose suits following the Red Army around the rink. The truth is that it's one thing to see that, and another entirely to imagine life under that kind of constant surveillance. Panic builds in his chest, buzzes in his ears. Malkin is alive, he's in the same building, Sid has to see him. He has to.

Too slow, he smiles weakly at her. "Thank— thank you," he stutters. "Look, I've got a friend, a Russian friend, who might come looking for me. Could you—" Sid swallows nervously, "Could you make sure he gets my room number?"

She gives him a look. "Sure," she says slowly. It's not technically against any rules Sid knows, but she must have questions. They all know the Russians.

"Thanks," he breathes, trying to force down the panic. "It's Sidney Forbes, room 231."

He tips her two hundred krona. It doesn't matter what she thinks, if she thinks he's a spy or a queer or a madman, as long as she passes on the number.

  
  
  
  


It's the longest evening of Sid's life.

Every sound outside the door, every footstep in the corridor, every creak of the building has him jumping out of his skin. He checks the peephole every five minutes and agonises over his decision.

Perhaps he should have stayed in the lobby, hung around in the faint hope that Malkin would pass through as well. What if he misses Malkin. What if he blows this chance. What if Malkin returns to the USSR, back across the iron curtain, into the depths of the Eastern Bloc where he'll be far beyond Sid's reach.

He sits and waits, stomach churning, sick dread building in his throat.

When the knock finally comes, Sid's across the room before he's even aware his feet are moving. He fumbles with the doorknob, pulling it open with shaking hands, then Malkin's pushing past him, the door slamming shut behind him.

And then Malkin's standing there.

He's bigger than Sid remembers. Even outside the greatcoat and hockey gear, he's lost the coltish length of his limbs, grown into a man with muscle on his arms, and breadth to his soldiers. Something fizzes in Sid's stomach, nerves and excitement and a wild glee.

"It's you," Sid croaks.

Malkin is staring at him, white-faced and wide-eyed.

"Sidney?" he asks disbelieving, accent thick around the vowels in the exact same way it had been all those years ago.

Sid nods frantically. "You're alive," he says wonderingly. "You’re alive."

Malkin's face creases with confusion; he begins speaking in fast and urgent Russian. And in that moment, Sid would give up anything, hockey, Cole Harbour, anything, to understand what he's saying.

Something of his desperation must show on his face, because Malkin falls silent. They stare at one another helplessly. Then Malkin reaches out and pulls Sid into a hug.

"Sidney," he repeats. It's not the answer Sid wants, but it's answer enough.

They hold on for a very long time, the only sound the quiet ticking of the clock in the corner.

Malkin is cold. Or not cold so much as not warm. The breath tickling the back of Sid's neck is cool; the skin beneath the crumpled white shirt is no warmer than Sid's own; the beating of his heart is heavy and slow, too slow for a person with a living body.

Sid swallows. "Evgeni," he says, and he can feel the tickle of Evgeni's smile into his hair.

They separate to stare at one another. Sid can't look away, doesn't want to in case he turns back and Evgeni's gone, lost again to the wide stretch of the globe.

"Good game," he says, because he has to say something. "Good win." He mimes flicking a puck into the net.

Malkin look confused for a moment, before his eyes crinkle, and his shoulders shake with laughter. "You good game," he says. "Good lose."

He's teasing, Sid realises with a jolt. Chirping: the universal language of hockey players.

"We'll get you next time," he replies, too soft to be a chirp.

Evgeni clearly doesn't understand, but he smiles anyway. Neither of them can seem to stop smiling.

There are a million questions Sid would like to ask. A million stories he would like to tell. With his five words of Russian and Evgeni's ten words of English, they manage a communication that is far more basic, made up of miming, smiles, and gentle touches. For now, that'll have to do.

Evgeni leaves when the first light of dawn begins filtering through the curtains. The only explanation Sid gets is grotesque faces of laughably exaggerated fear. Or at least, Sid hopes it’s an exaggeration. They’ve all heard the stories.

"Super series," Evgeni says, when he's stood in front of the door.

Sid nods. "Super series," he says, pushing down the urge to reach after him, to slam the door shut firm against the USSR, against the NHL, against the whole damn world.

The Super Series. They'll see each other again.

  
  
  


1975

Two years is not, in the grand scheme of Sid's life, a long time. He tells himself this a lot as the days, weeks, and months of the run up to the 1976 Super Series trickle down.

In any case, he has no shortage of distractions. There's learning Russian, filling his head with vocabulary and grammar in a way he never had to do with French. There's hockey, squeezing every second possible out of a career that's already a risk. There's winning another Stanley Cup, too.

He keeps busy.

Late at night, when he's left to his own thoughts, the minutes still drag into an eternity.

  
  
  
  


1976

The Red Army beats the Rangers, 7 to 3.

Sid watches with his teammates. In theory, it's strategy for next week; in practice, it's mostly an excuse to complain about the Russian style of play.

"Bunch of fucking pussies," Shuttsy swears as Maltsev takes a lightning-fast pass from centre and slams home the final goal.

Dryden laughs. "They never stay still long enough to hit 'em."

Sid tries to tune them out, to focus on Evgeni. There's precious little tape available of the Russians, only really from the Olympics and major international tournaments; what there is Sid's watched so often that his tapes have worn thin and scratchy. He's starved for footage of Evgeni's play.

The way Evgeni skates and dekes, knifing through defenceman like they're beer leaguers, is unbelievable to watch. It's even better like this, knowing he's only a scarce few hundred miles away, knowing that in a week's time that'll be Sid squaring off against Evgeni.

  
  
  
  


The security is less intense in Montreal. That's mostly for diplomatic reasons, Sid gathers. Canada isn't keen on having a squad of KGB agents wandering Montreal, and unlike Sweden they've got the political weight to throw around to get them out.

It makes sneaking into Evgeni's room on the Russians' first night in Montreal positively easy.

"Sidney," says Evgeni when he opens the door, ushering him through into the hotel room. "Good see you," he says slowly, each word carefully formed, accents worlds improved from what it had been two years ago.

He’s been practicing, must have been to sound like that. It’s absurd and juvenile in a way Sid hasn’t felt in decades, but his insides fill with something warm and melty.

Sid beams at him. "Рад тебя видеть," he replies, and he's tripping over the pronunciation even more than usual. Evgeni must agree because he sniggers. He looks pleased, though.

That makes every second of pouring over textbooks worth it.

Their vocabulary is still limited. Sid's _Russian for Beginners_ didn't have a section on immortality, and while Evgeni's English is nearing conversational, he stumbles when the conversation moves away from hockey.

They make do.

"Have you met— некто похожий?" asks Sid, stumbling over the words. "Person like us? Another person?"

Evgeni shakes his head seriously. "You and me," he says. "I'm not know other."

"Me neither," Sid says quietly. He didn't really expect otherwise, not with how shocked Evgeni had been to see him again. He can’t find it in himself to feel disappointed, only desperately shakily relieved that among the billions of people on the planet, against the ridiculousness of the odds, he’s found Evgeni.

  
  
  
  


They talk all through the night, alternating the easy flow of hockey talk with the more difficult questions.

"Most bad—" Evgeni breaks off to mutter in Russian. "Most bad hurt?"

Sid looks at him blankly.

Evgeni shakes his head, exasperated. "Most bad hurt you're— heal? Make better?"

"Oh!" Sid exclaims, "Oh, like injuries." Then he grimaces exaggeratedly. "I got shot in the chest," he says, miming a gun with his fingers. "It was gross. I could see my lungs and everything."

Evgeni looks suitably impressed, or at least responds well to Sid's enthusiastic playacting.

"That took about three days to heal properly," Sid continues.

"I'm shot in shoulder," Geno says. "Two, three hours for heal." He looks at Sid sideways, "Maybe Russia heal best."

Sid rolls his eyes, loose and silly the way he hasn't since Taylor was alive.

He kisses Evgeni on the way out the next morning. It's a coward's move, leaving with Evgeni's shocked wide eyes staring after him, unable to see him or say anything until the next evening. Part of him wants to give Evgeni space to think; Sid's got pretty good at knowing when someone's going to punch him, and when someone's going to kiss back, but he can never be too sure. Part of him is just scared; for all that he has loved before, for all that he had been so tempted in the back of a Vancouver bar to stay and build something, no one has ever matter so much as Evgeni.

He needn't have worried.

That evening, when Sid comes back, Evgeni pulls him into the room and presses himself, heavy and solid, against Sid's front. This time they only pull apart when Sid's smiling too hard to continue.

  
  
  


The Russians are in Montreal for a week.

Sid had thought he might be able to smuggle Evgeni out of the hotel for a few trips around the city, but the Russians have a single-minded dedication to training and discipline that goes far beyond anything Sid’s ever seen. When the Russians are allowed out of the rink, they’re expected to move as a group, watched as much as possible by their handlers.

“What,” asks Sid, exasperated by a long day of waiting. “Do they think you’re going to be kidnapped?”

“Stay safe from capitalist corruption,” Evgeni says, pressing a kiss to Sid’s belly. He’s smiling like it’s a huge joke. Maybe it is, but Sid wonders sometimes. Evgeni doesn’t criticise his home; he’ll gaze enviously at the luxuries of Canadian living - pizza, jeans, and steak on demand - and gripe about how much Russia lacks. But there’s a difference between complaint and criticism.

  
  
  


Whatever the days are like, the nights are theirs.

They lie awake with the curtains pulled shut, locked away from the rest of the world, just the two of them.

It’s an openness that Sid hasn’t had with anyone ever. To be able to speak without second-guessing his references, without keeping a constant wary track of the lies he’s telling, of which version of himself he’s living. It’s like a break after skating for hours, slowing down after going so fast for so long that he’d almost forgotten what it was to just be.

“This one?” he asks, tracing the uneven skin of a burn scar across Evgeni’s chest.

Evgeni crosses his arms behind his head. “I’m fight bear,” he says proudly. “Big bear, very angry.”

“Bullshit,” Sid laughs, flicking the scar hard.

“I’m true” he protests, rolling over on top of Sid, grinning down like he thinks he’s smooth. “I’m very small, very stupid. Catch rabbit. Think mama, papa happy for eating. Bear find rabbit.” He breaks off to shrug smugly.

Sid shakes his head wordlessly.

  
  
  
  


"It was quiet before the end," Sid says on the third night. Geno's sat on the side of the bed, weight dragging down the mattress, pulling Sid towards him. “Before I died.”

It’s strange to say; the words feel wrong on his tongue, reckless and unbelievable.

"Almost peaceful, you know," he continues. "I'd gone through the panic, the thrashing about. And the water just took me."

There’s a long moment of silence. Evgeni lies back on the bed, propping himself up on an arm to watch Sid. “Water?” he asks quietly. “Like, boats? The sea?”

Sid nods. “My dad was a fisherman. I’d spent my whole life on boats, thought I knew the sea better than anyone. By the time I realised that the storm was too big, it was too late.” He breaks off to swallow thickly.

Geno takes Sid’s hand and toys idly with the fingers.

“My mum found my body a few days later. Just on the shore. It took them a few days before they realised that… yeah.”

“Хладнотелый,” Evgeni says. It’s not a word Sid recognises, except for the prefix. Cold.

“Хладнотелый,” Sid repeats. It’s as good a word as any. “Yeah.”

The silence thickens, a question hanging there unspoken. Sid’s curious, desperately curious, but he doesn’t want to ask, doesn’t want to know unless Evgeni wants to tell.

Evgeni sighs. "I’m almost same," he says, reaching up to touch his fingers to his throat. "But take long time, not quiet. газ.”

And Sid doesn’t need a translator for that one. “Gas,” he says hoarsely.

“I’m not mask,” Evgeni continues, voice nearly a whisper. “Very slow.”

Sid never saw mustard gas used; wrong war. He’d heard the horror stories, though, the cautionary tales they used to tell new recruits, the ones meant to guarantee they’d hold tight to their masks. It's a horrible thought, a young Geno, small in his oversized uniform, those big soft eyes tearing up, choking helplessly, as he burnt up from the inside out.

“How— how old were you?”

Evgeni sighs, closes his eyes against something Sid can’t see. “Seventeen,” he says. “After war, I’m go home. Can’t find mama, papa, brother. Germans come, they leave home for— for be safe.” He swallows. “Never see again.”

They’d all seen the figures, made the jokes about Russia’s bottomless reservoir of bodies to throw at the Krauts. The shame Sid feels is choking. Millions. Millions of men, of boys like Evgeni.

Sid kisses him to block it out, kisses him again until the images have receded, and it’s just them, safe and quiet in a hotel room on the other side of the world.

  
  
  


The game is scheduled for the penultimate day of their stay. By then, Sid barely cares.

“Give ‘em a proper Canadian welcome, boys,” Bowman says in the locker room beforehand, something vicious in his voice. “The world is watching.”

Evgeni’s watching too. The world pales in comparison to that.

They make it to a draw. Three-three.

Normally, Sid would hate that; there’s nothing so infuriating as a game that close, where one small bounce, one more fight, one well-placed pass would have clinched it. This time, though, it just feels strangely appropriate, a draw, a middle-ground.

  
  
  
  


He waits until late that night, after Evgeni’s teammates have come stumbling down the corridor, and the sounds of drunken clattering from the rooms around them have long since faded, until Evgeni’s lips are red and kiss-swollen.

"Don’t go back to Russia,” Sid says into the quiet.

There’s a long beat of silence. “Stay here,” Sid continues, almost begging now, the words falling from him like a prayer. “We could go north. There are places where no one’s even heard of the NHL. I could fish, you could— you could fight polar bears—”

That gets a snort of laughter out of Evgeni, and for one perfect, shining minute, Sid knows that he’s considering it, really considering it. The seconds tick by, and Sid barely dares to breathe, an awful hope congealing in his throat.

"Sid," Evgeni says, voice thick with emotion. He reaches forward, catches Sid's hand and grips it tightly.

Then he shakes his head.

It hurts more than Sid would have thought possible a week ago. He knows it’s not a rejection, not personal, but it feels like one. It feels like a fucking punch.

“Why not?” Sid asks, snatching his hand away. It comes out hurt, angry. He swallows, forces the anger out and tries again. “Evgeni, what— what is there in Russia?”

“Is hockey,” he says almost regretfully. “Is hockey. Is friends. Is— Is Russia, is home.”

“There’s hockey here! There are friends here! There’s”— Sid’s voice catches embarrassingly —”There’s me.”

Evgeni shakes his head again, face crumpling, and now he’s looking really upset. “Is not fair,” Evgeni says, something like anger speaking into his voice. “Is not easy. Leave. Speak English, live Canada, never go home, never see friends.”

“You’ll be able to go home! Give it fifty years, maybe less. The USSR won’t last forever,” Sid says desperately. “It won’t. The whole world can see it’s falling apart. Everyone knows it.”

“Everyone know,” Evgeni repeats derisively, voice rising into a whisper-shout. “You’re not know! You’re not understand! What Canada know about Russia! You know so much, you come live Russia?”

Sid scowls. “I don’t want to end up in a fucking gulag,” he snaps.

Evgeni flinches, and Sid’s instantly guilty. He hates seeing Evgeni so visibly distressed, hates being the cause of it even more. The anger drains away, leaving him empty and cold. He sits down on the bed next to Evgeni, leans his head into Evgeni’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly.

Evgeni doesn’t say anything, but he puts an arm around Sid’s waist.

“Please,” Sid says, dropping the last shreds of his pride. “I’ve just found you. I can’t lose you again.”

“Not lose you,” Evgeni says earnestly, turning to look at Sid. “Not for always. I’m—” he breaks off, struggling with the words. “I’m want finish hockey, make country proud. Is best honour, best in life, play hockey for Red Army. I’m want finish.”

And Sid doesn’t get it, not really. He’s never felt that tie to Canada. Not when he grew up, not when he served, not when he’s stood in front of the world wearing a maple leaf on his chest. But it matters to Evgeni, and maybe he can understand that. Maybe a country means more when you and your father and your father’s father have bled for its soil.

“If I’m leave, I’m not come back. Is hard, dangerous. I’m want first say goodbye, home, friends.”

Sid nods mutely, lets his head rub against Evgeni’s neck, tries to preserve the clinging smell of him. He’s not going to change Evgeni’s mind. He’s not sure he wants to. He’s not going to go with him either. He doesn’t want to live in Russia, to be stuck there, a stranger in a strange, hostile land, stuck there for potentially years, so far away from Cole Harbour and the Stanley Cups he’s yet to win, so far away from home.

Evgeni presses promises into his skin, mingled Russian and English. Sid closes his eyes and tries to make their final hours last forever.

  
  
  


He drives back alone through the still-empty morning streets of Montreal.

The trees lining the road morph into the shadows of fishermen along a harbour wall, and Sid misses home with a breathless ache, misses Evgeni worse.

The rest of the series is shown on television.

The Soviets lose both games. First to the Bruins, then to the Flyers. Evgeni plays poorly, three points and not a single goal in the series.

Sid wants to feel pleased, pleased that Evgeni is missing him, pleased that the Canadians have their series victory. Instead, all he feels is empty.

  
  
  


1979

He quits the Canadiens about the same time that comments about his "preternatural good looks" start appearing in interviews.

"It's a torn MCL," the team spokesman explains to the reporters, who scribble frantically into their notepads. Sid sits next to her, ducks his head and looks sombre. "Sidney's asking for privacy in this difficult time." She repeats it in English, louder this time over the hushed whispers that have broken out across the room.

He makes his way out of the room to pats on the back and murmured condolences. They all know what that means for a twenty-nine year old. It's the end.

Sid tells the front office that he wants a break.

"It'll help, I think—" His voice shakes, and he isn't sure how much of it is the painkillers, how much is an act, how much is just him. "Going home for a few years. Getting away from it all."

"You take as long as you need, son," says Grundman. The sympathy is real. So is the disappointment; there are a few more good years on Sid's contract, but they're the Canadiens. They're not short on stars. "You'll be up north then, eh?"

Sid hums noncommittally, "Nunavat."

"Well, you keep in touch, you hear me."

Sid smiles tiredly, and they shake hands.

Then he gets on a flight to Europe.

  
  
  
  
  


The secret to disappearing is to commit. Hold on to nothing. Never look back. Shed friends, memories, and names like water off a boat.

Sid used to hate it, used to have nightmares of losing himself to the blur of names and faces. It got easier with practice. He tells himself that's a good thing, tries not to think about it too hard.

It's not like there isn't enough in Europe to keep him busy. The bloody wounded continent he remembers has scarred over into something that's rough and aged and bright with hope. Greece, where tourists with thick Boston accents pose in front of buildings that remember Socrates; Spain, where he watches men and women march down the streets with rainbow flags; Yugoslavia, a country that's younger than he is; France, where he lives for five years, rounding the provinces out of his accent, killing evenings in old rinks with peeling paint and flickering lights.

He visits Germany, too. The Berlin wall is incongruously bright, emblazoned with graffiti flowers, peace symbols and rows of cartoonish faces, defiantly joyful against the grey world behind the curtain. Sid walks along it, picking out the shapes of look-out towers, of great iron fences, of the barbed-wire crawling over the wall like twisted ivy.

He's lived across that wall, traipsed up and down the shelled-out German countryside, played a game that was neither shinny nor bandy against a Soviet soldier. The Elbe is as unreachable now as the moon; Evgeni more so.

Sidney misses him.

He tells himself that's stupid. Cumulatively he's spent maybe a week with Evgeni, probably less. That's not enough to know a man, not enough to miss him like a constant screaming ache.

Sid misses him anyway. He misses his dopey smile, his kind eyes, his perfect hockey. He misses what they could have been, those brief shining moments of hope for a future full of laughter and companionship.

Any anger is long gone now. All that's left is an awful despairing kind of sadness, a quiet hope that wherever he is, whatever his name now, whatever his life is like, Evgeni is okay.

  
  
  
  


1989

Alexander Mogilny disappears in Stockholm. Two months later, he skates onto American ice and scores in the game's opening minutes. Three months later, he's convicted in absentia of desertion.

It's the first time Sid's seen ice hockey make world news since the American’s Miracle.

"Well, I can promise you this, the Soviets won't take that betrayal lightly," says the presenter, accent crackling thick over the radio. "Mogilny isn't going to be seeing the motherland again for a very long time."

"Or his mother," laughs his co-host.

"He'd better hope he likes America."

Sid changes the channel.

He trusts Evgeni. He really does, but it’s been almost twenty years. It’s a long time to wait, a long time to hope, a long time for doubts to creep in.

  
  
  


1991

The wall comes down. For days, every newspaper, radio, and television all show the same images of newly reunified Germany, of families reunited, of friends holding each other close, of a wall pulled apart by thousands of hammers, chisels and scrabbling hands.

And Sid’s done waiting.

He keeps a mailbox in Cole Harbour, checks it a few times a year. Still nothing: no request for an address, no travel details, no update. Fine, if Evgeni won’t communicate with Sid, then Sid will take matters into his own hands.

It takes a few years. Getting into the NHL is more difficult these days than it was thirty years ago, especially now that he’s finally starting to pass as being in his mid-twenties. Any semi-professional coach would laugh at a twenty-four year old newcomer with no hockey history. Still, where there’s a will, there’s a way. Where there’s a will and extensive experience in obtaining forged documents, the way is even easier.

The Swedish Hockey League has a lower threshold for entry, less interest in where a guy played as an eight year-old, and enough American media coverage that when Sid breaks the league points record by more than doubling it, he starts getting phone calls.

The Swedes aren’t thrilled; they introduce their import rule the month after Sid gets offered a contract by the Penguins. In retrospect, he probably didn’t need to double the record. Ninety points would have been fine; a hundred and twenty was a bit excessive. He never did have much self-control on the ice.

God, though, Sid had really missed hockey.

He gets a contract offer from the Pittsburgh Penguins that summer. Pittsburgh isn’t where he would have chosen - maybe Vancouver or Toronto, since Montreal felt like pushing his luck - but it’s a good city, a young team with potential, and Sid likes a challenge.  
  
  


2005

He hears the news on SportsNet first. It's background television, white noise left on while Sid washes his hockey gear. He still does it by hand; it gets him chirped by his teammates, but some old habits are hard to break. 

"...Evgeni Malkin's career took off last year in the KHL..."

It's stupid how so many years later, the name Evgeni, even mangled through a thick American accent, is enough to have him snapping to attention, heart twinging in a mockery of a beat.

"... a franchise record forty goals in his rookie season. Looks like that attracted NHL attention because this morning, he signed a one-year two-way deal with the Penguins."

Another voice cuts in, "I'm hearing from Barry - that's JP Barry, Malkin's agent - that Malkin turned down more term elsewhere to take the Pittsburgh contract."

"That's a confident move, betting on himself to... "

The words run together, and Sid's stumbling to where his phone's charging on the sideboard. He grabs it, water and soap suds spraying over the wire, and types in 'Evgeni Malkin' with shaking fingers.

It's him.

2011

Evgeni arrives in Pittsburgh a week before training camp is due to begin.

Sid offers to meet him at the airport, tells the team that they know each other from a Euro training camp. It's not even that untrue.

Evgeni isn't hard to spot, head and shoulders above most of the crowd, wrapped in a double denim look that reminds Sid powerfully of the eighties.

"Pittsburgh, huh?" Sid asks in lieu of a greeting, reaching over to take one of Evgeni's many bags.

Evgeni smiles at him, huge and breath-taking and maybe the tiniest bit nervous. "I'm miss you," he says shrugging slightly. "Want play best team, best Sid."

Sid's chest tightens and, fuck, he is so helplessly, wordlessly thrilled that Evgeni is here.

Something of that must show in his expression because Evgeni's face twists, and he pulls Sid tight into a hug. Evgeni smells like travel, all old sweat and recycled air; Sid's arms are trapped uncomfortably next to a carrybag; and, he never wants to let go.

"You're not going again," Sid whispers, halfway between an order or a plea. "Not without me."

Evgeni's head moves above his, like he's shaking it. "I'm stay," he says. "I'm stay."

20??

"I don't think they'll be forgetting about us," Sid tells Evgeni as the banners rise slowly into the rafters, "Not for a very long time."

The world feels so small, shrinking more day by day. It's not one that's built for secrets, for mystery, not anymore.

Evgeni turns and grins down at him, wide and lopsided and achingly familiar. "We grow moustache," he says. "Never recognise."

Sid resists rolling his eyes, but can't hold back a smile.

They'll be alright.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on [tumblr](https://sequestering.tumblr.com/).
> 
> Comments are adored.


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